Soviet Union Occupational Disease

By Bruce W. Nelan

Sometimes the invasion is the easy part. It is what comes after that truly tests the resolve of the conqueror and slowly drains away victory.

Once the decision to intervene in Azerbaijan was made, Soviet army tanks, so often the Kremlin's tool for political repression, thundered through makeshift barricades and swept easily into the center of riotous Baku. Since then, however, nothing has been easy for the occupying force of some 40,000 from the army, Interior Ministry and KGB. They have found it almost impossible to pacify the people of Azerbaijan, who for two years have been inflamed by a bitter blood feud with neighboring Armenia over control of the mountainous enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. Last week black flags waved from housetops, sirens wailed and ships' horns echoed over Baku harbor as some 800,000 Azerbaijanis thronged the streets, in defiance of emergency regulations, to mourn their hundred or more "martyrs" killed in street clashes with Soviet troops. Among the marchers' signs: a photograph of Mikhail Gorbachev over the word WANTED.

After almost 70 years as a republic of the U.S.S.R., Azerbaijan seemed to peel off its Soviet trappings almost overnight, turning into a foreign country under occupation by invaders. Enraged Azerbaijanis called for guerrilla warfare and swore to "fight to the last drop of blood" to drive the Soviets out. Almost a third of the republic's 380,000 Communist Party members burned their membership cards. Local government offices and police units ignored Moscow and looked to the ten-month-old Azerbaijani Popular Front for leadership. "If Gorbachev wants a second Afghanistan," shouted Ekhtibar Mamedov, the Front's representative in the Soviet capital, "he will get it in Azerbaijan." Mamedov was later detained by police.

Western correspondents were still barred from the region, but the news that emerged last week did in fact sound like reports from a war zone:

-- Captains of more than 50 merchant ships from Caspian Sea oil refineries blockaded Baku harbor, threatening to blow up tankers and drilling platforms unless they were allowed to inspect ships leaving port. Rumor had it that Soviet troops had killed thousands and were dumping the corpses at sea. Army artillery barrages broke up the blockade, and troops boarded several of the ships. Lieut. General Mikhail Kolesnikov reported that one soldier was killed and two were wounded in the operation.

-- Snipers fired from windows and rooftops, killing at least two soldiers. Troops on the ground, unable to spot their attackers, responded with streams of bullets.

-- Shooting between soldiers and nationalist guerrillas continued around the Salyan military barracks in Baku, with civilians sometimes hit in the cross fire.

-- Gunmen on motorcycles, some of them in police or military uniforms, dashed through the city at night taking potshots at soldiers on patrol. Soviet Defense Minister Dmitri Yazov claimed that 40,000 armed "extremists" still roamed the republic.

-- Hundreds of Azerbaijani Muslims who had illegally entered into Iran returned home, many of them bearing weapons. Ayatullah Abdul Karim Moussavi Ardebili, a former Iranian Chief Justice, said in Tehran that Communist states are "anti-God" and that Soviet Azerbaijan is now a "great market for the introduction of Islam." Though Iranian officials played down the crisis, perhaps fearing that Iran's Azerbaijani minority might take a lesson from events across the border, Ardebili's speech raised the possibility that Gorbachev should be less worried about Azerbaijan's becoming another Afghanistan than about its turning into another Iran.

-- Just as Armenians fled from Azerbaijani pogroms the week before, some 15,000 dependents of the military and KGB divisions stationed in the republic were evacuated. "We could hear shooting in the city," Nadezhda Appakov, an officer's wife, told TASS. "We feared for our children most of all, because those militants stop at nothing." The newspaper Trud reported that a pogrom had begun against the remaining 85,000 ethnic Russians in the republic, but Popular Front officials offered assurances that the Russians would not be attacked by Azerbaijani nationalists. Moscow agreed to hold off on further evacuations.

-- The Azerbaijani legislature backed away from a threat to secede if military ( forces did not leave immediately, but the republic has called on the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R. to withdraw army troops from Baku.

The Communist Party youth daily, Komsomolskaya Pravda, disclosed last week that two senior colonels, both veterans of the nine-year war in Afghanistan, sent a telegram to Gorbachev and Defense Minister Yazov two weeks ago urging them not to use force in Azerbaijan. Military intervention, they warned, would lead to a "complete disruption in relations" with the local people and "trigger the growth of anti-Russian feeling."

Both of those predictions have come grimly to pass, and Moscow last week was signaling its eagerness to extricate itself from the republic. Its troops rounded up about 80 leaders of the Front's paramilitary arm, the National Defense Council, and other illegal organizations, seizing firearms, bombs and uniforms. At the same time, the Kremlin drew a distinction between the Front's guerrillas and its political organizers, who will inevitably have to take part in future negotiations with the central government.

The Soviet Minister of the Interior, Vadim Bakatin, told a press conference in Baku that Azerbaijan's own police force suffered only a "temporary" loss of control when mobs broke into Armenian homes and killed dozens of people. He suggested that the Front confer with the police on restoring order. "There are," said Bakatin, "undoubtedly healthy forces within the Popular Front with whom the police must actively cooperate." But Bakatin obviously had a different opinion of the police than his ministerial colleague at Defense did: Yazov publicly accused the police of supplying guns to the Front.

No matter how quickly the state of emergency is ended and peacekeeping troops are withdrawn -- and that might not be quickly at all -- Gorbachev will not be able to repair fully the political damage the invasion has wrought in Azerbaijan and the rest of the country. The head of the Azerbaijani Communist Party was dismissed for "serious mistakes" and replaced by the republic's premier, Ayaz Mutalibov, but the move cannot redeem the prestige of a party now identified with the military occupation. Yazov seemed to confirm last week that Gorbachev intervened not to save Armenian lives but to prevent the Popular Front from taking control of Azerbaijan. "The army's actions," he said, "are directed at destroying the organizational structure of the Popular Front leaders who are keen on seizing power."

^ Fear of anarchy, always the darkest nightmare in Russian hearts, is now widespread. Too much has happened too soon -- in Eastern Europe, in the Baltics, in the Muslim south -- and it seems to many that things are flying apart. The front page of Izvestia asked last week, "Will there be perestroika or not?" Literaturnaya Gazeta echoed the question, commenting, "All the weak points are coming to the fore, regardless of which region you try to assess." A group of liberal parliamentarians demanded a special session of the legislature to discuss the crisis in the Caucasus. Said People's Deputy Sergei Stankevich: "There is a civil war in the Caucasus, and the Supreme Soviet is on holiday."

It is not only the outlook for perestroika that is in doubt; Gorbachev's own future seems less than guaranteed. Foreign Ministry spokesman Gennadi Gerasimov repeated the traditional response last week when asked whether the President's position was endangered: "There is no alternative to it. There are no alternative leaders. There are no alternative policies." That is not self-evident. In the Soviet Union there are always alternatives, even if they are unpleasant, and there are always ambitious leaders, even if they are unimaginative.

Most Western diplomats and scholars have long believed that Gorbachev's grip on power was solid because of his political skills: he purged large numbers of his political opponents, as well as the deadwood, at the top of the party. After more than four years of such culling, it seemed to Sovietologists that Gorbachev could not be toppled by traditional Kremlin plotting of the type that ended Nikita Khrushchev's reign in 1964. That analysis leaves open the question of a coup by the security forces, the army and the KGB. There has never been an army coup in Russia or the Soviet Union, but the experts are no longer ruling it out with quite the certainty they have displayed in the past.

There is at least some possibility of a coalition that would unite angry conservatives in the party with worried bureaucrats at all levels and military men who resent their increasing role in controlling ethnic rebellion. "There is grist for their mill," says a senior Western diplomat in Moscow of such opponents. "They want to restore centralization, keep the country strong. It's a prescription for a real Russian-dominated empire." If disorder does increase, he adds, "maybe a leader will emerge."

Even without a head-to-head challenger, continued upheavals in the non- Russian republics and perestroika's failure to fill empty stores with food and clothing are sending Gorbachev's popularity plummeting among ordinary citizens. How Mikhail Gorbachev handles the occupation of Azerbaijan -- and how the Azerbaijanis react -- will affect not only the future of his policies but the fate of the policymaker himself.

With reporting by Ann Blackman and John Kohan/Moscow